A Monologue by Force Ghost Luke Skywalker
by baer tresca
Summary: I envision this taking place in Episode IX or that approximate time frame.


The New Republic, the Old one, the First Order, the Separatists, hell, even the Sith and the Jedi; every last one of these bodies has been a plague upon the galaxy, always taking more than they've given. I wasn't alive when this started, and lo and behold I am dead and these games continue.

Cynical, you might say. Well let me tell you, even my father the most despicable man ever to have lived, even he was nothing more than a product of the arrogance and complacency of a religious order that was so accustomed to the banality of evil they couldn't see Darth Sidious two feet in front of them. Our protectors, the ones who are self-appointed and answerable to no one, who are supposed to be the check on imminent and catastrophic evil, were comfortable with depriving children entirely of love, if it benefited them. And in their oblivious aristocratic arrogance, they tried to convince Vader's only son that his father was gone and beyond redemption, little more than the mindless droids he had so prolifically destroyed on his masters' orders. A mindless zealot who was seduced by Sidious because he was weak.

Not because he was an enslaved child who was separated from his mother - kept apart because the Jedi thought old Shmi would be a corrupting influence on her own son. Or because he was taught that loving his partner was wrong. Or because he was conscripted into a war that had no bearing on the material conditions of the home planet he dreamed of one day liberating, which went on being tormented by petty tyrants who exploited the indifference of the galaxy's ruling classes. No, they would have had me believe that Anakin's downfall was his own lack of commitment to their divine teachings.

My downfall was to ignore the nagging in my head, the voice that asked why Yoda and Ben tried so hard to talk me out of saving my own father. Were these the noble and compassionate mystics that would put the galaxy back on the right track if they weren't as dead as me? Was their dogmatic, repressive religion really what we needed more of? I should have heeded my own doubts, but really, I had no one else to follow. Imagine-I'm this wide-eyed 20something and all of a sudden I'm a super high-ranking officer in a political-military alliance that's got the big bad Empire on the ropes. Holy shit, I needed a little praxis to work with and pronto.

Honestly if I could go back, I woulda spent more time with the Wookies. They were members of the Republic for thousands of years and managed somehow to be so unflinchingly ungovernable that the Senate thanked them just for showing up to assemblies and helping them fill committee assignments. Chancellors generally considered it a victory if the delegation from Kashyyyk only threatened to organize a boycott of Corellian ship manufacturers if their workforce wasn't paid a minimum of 15 Republic credits per hour, rather than sending a detachment of commandos in to bolster the strikers' ranks.

But I digress. And at the end of the day even the Wookies with their supposed deep commitment to grassroots democracy and interstellar solidarity found themselves willingly participating in a war they would ultimately "win," and for their trouble Palpatine thanked them with twenty-four years of enslavement and tyranny.

The point I guess is this: if the good guys are capable of wrongdoing, which they are, and even a stormtrooper can decide to switch sides, then maybe instead of worshiping at the altar of these old political structures that we KNOW we don't want, we come up with something new that incorporates the best the galaxy has to offer. And maybe instead of picking a side based on who we were told our saviors are, we could pick the side that we know is right and let the chips fall where they may. The fact that lazy rationalizations for following bad leaders has survived so far into the hyperspace era is disturbing to say the least. We need to look closely at these Jedi and Sith, Skywalkers and Solos, and judge them on their real merits and not just their surnames.

With no Republic left, and in its place a powerful fascist enemy, bloodied but far from beaten, at this moment we must appeal to the best instincts of every people across the stars, which will give us the only weapon that has ever vanquished an existential threat: hope.


End file.
